lesson 85,326…

So, I was in a shop the other day that has those quotable cards? And I saw one I hadn’t seen before – this… Which intruded into my consciousness slowly, like …

Leeeeettt ggggoooooo….

Very gentle, very zen, very like, Hey, female person, why so tense? Chill. Relaaaxxxxx. Hushhhh.

And I thought, Hey, Universe. Thanks. Will do. Good point well made. Let go. Of course. That’s obviously been the central message for a while now, and now it’s in print in front of me in a shop. Got it.

All this in nanoseconds, of course.

And then the rest of the words trickled in:

OR BE DRAGGED.

Whereupon I barked with laughter. As you do. (it was all in this very mellow, hippie-dippy, new-agey female voice that i imagined it,which undoubtedly added tremendously to the whole experience.)

OK. Got it. So.

Health issues of a family member in the US were worrisome enough that I needed to go there somewhat urgently. I sold the boat and packed a few bags and left the rest behind and that were that. Dissertation finished and submitted amidst all this. Fingers crossed I didn’t embarrass myself too badly, but I don’t hold out much hope. Passing would be nice.

In any case, the boat is now in the hands of a couple who seem to be the perfect match – which made leaving it all behind bearable.

So that’s probably it for the blog, cos I don’t have any interesting left.

asterisms, actually

All the fingers on my right hand are bleeding, both knees are skinned/grazed, I’ve torn my damn overalls/dungarees, I smell like the elephant house, my muscles are all so sore that it hurts to sit, stand, and walk (and stairs are a special torture)… I am exhausted, and I have constellations of bruises all over (with a galaxy or two), but I am grinning. Tuesday: not grinning. Yesterday morning: not grinning. Yesterday afternoon and thereafter: grinning.

Moving out was horrid – because of the bank holiday I couldn’t do my usual and get the van the day before I was meant to be out, but I thought I’d be able to manage to pick up the truck for 10.30ish, load the truck in three hours and make it down to the boat and unload before dark. I can’t explain why I thought this. It reminds me a bit of the time I was meant to be making the turkey at Christmas one year, and I was a lot more laid-back than my grandmother about dinnertime, and when she realised that on my plan we wouldn’t be eating til maybe 4 she took over the cooking so we could eat at 1, as God intended. She wasn’t interested in the fact that the sausage in the stuffing needed cooking first, nor was she familiar with the concept that cooking a turkey isn’t subject to the same rules as addition and multiplication, i.e., if you’re meant to cook a turkey at 350 for 6 hours, you can’t make up for lost time by cooking it at 700 for 3 hours. Likewise me with the moving thing. Especially since I’m much outer of shape than I was the last few times I did marathon pack/move/unpacks on my own.

Have I mentioned about the exhausted? Sorry for the extra lashings of incoherence.

So I didn’t even leave Southampton til after 5.30 in the evening, and had spent the last few hours sprinting around hurling things into bin bags and chucking them into the van (for some reason boxes were specially hard to procure this time. I was refused requests for used boxes from one shop on the grounds that they had to be recycled…), and bin bags neither protect nor stack very well. (the song going through my head for the final two hours or so was Dylan – ‘if you got to go, go now, or else you’ve got to stay all night’. much less sexy in this context, but a good soundtrack nonetheless.) The bike survived the trip in spite of my very nasty van loading. I had about 15 minutes of twilight left when I got to the boat, and with the help of a neighbour I got about half of it unloaded and my bed set up, and he ran me an extension lead so I could have a light. (and also he let me boil water in his kettle for my hot water bottle – it has been freezing at night all through August – as in, not many degrees above actual freezing.)

Next day I woke up and tried to figure out where to start – I needed to clear up and get some order before I brought more crap inside, and other than 3 boxes, two foot locker/trunk things, a bed and a chair, I have no furniture and no storage, so there really is no ‘away’ to put things. Plus there are spiders. The boat has been sitting empty since before Christmas, and the spiders and cobwebs and spiderwebs and also SPIDERS were very everywhere and scary. So, since I had the use of electricity, I thought I’d start by hoovering them all up. Which I mostly did, maybe half to three-quarters of the boat’s worth. And while I was doing that, muscles aching, the heavy half of the van still to unload, not knowing where any of my food was (and not having eaten in about 24 hours) I was feeling very sorry for myself, and wondering how I was going to face telling everyone that I bailed on the whole boat thing, and how I could make it sound less like I’m a feeble loser for not managing to last 12 hours. But then neighbour number two appeared, and said ‘What do you need? How can I help? Let me tell you and show you a lot of important thingsand introduce you to people you need to talk to.’ And the sun started shining, metaphorically speaking. (it had been shining in the literal way for two whole days at that point, which was lovely.)

So. Important information was conveyed, introductions were made, Things were arranged, and yet a different mooring was sorted (remains to be seen where I will end up, but it all seems good…), and I met the site’s owner and a few other people and had good chats with them and generally felt that the universe was a pretty good place and things would be ok after all.

All my crap is now in the boat, the van has been returned, I have a huge bag of sawdust (shitbuckets not set up yet though – but there are toilets onsite, so that’s ok for now!), my bed is sleepable-on, I have a tiny bit of order, I’ve eaten two whole meal-like things on board, and I might be getting to the point where I can see what needs to be done next, and next-next. I will have electrical and water hookup, and I’ve been told that there might be a spare fridge lying around, and also a spare woodstove (or even a gas stove – which I might consider, cos I really would like to be able to bake) – and I might consider the other woodstove, maybe, but I might stick with the Pipsqueak, but either way, there are people here who know how to do things like drill holes in roofs, and for not much money will do so, and for a bit more money might install the stove as well, which I might think about. Fantastickest Neighbour keeps telling me ‘don’t get X or Y, I have a spare one of those…’.

All such a relief. I really had felt like I’d have to figure out everything on my own, and facing it while tapped out was daunting, but just being surrounded by all the nice people who keep being helpful I’m full of smiles again. There are families living here, and people have gardens, and it is crazy beautiful, and this morning I opened the door and got a facefull of the top half of the sun rising over the hills, hitting the mist coming off the river. The nights haven’t been specially clear, but I’m seeing more stars than I’ve seen in years. Once the boat is moved, I’ll have a bit better view from it than I have now (boats from three sides and a wall of vegetation from the 4th), and more light. I’ll wait to set up the solar til then. Since I’ll have electricity from the hookup, I might be able to use some powertools to get some work done as and when the weather allows. I’d like to start stripping off some rust and old paint and prime/paint in small, do-able chunks…

And feedback for the first half of the diss has been helpful, and I’m putting in a few applications for jobs (and possibly phds…).

I’ve got three candles lit now instead of the electric lights, and even though the interior of the boat looks like I’m squatting in a shipping container in a junkyard, it’s very cosy. Tomorrow morning I should be able to have my normal porridge breakfast, and have a shower (there’s washers, dryers, toilets, and a shower in the boatyard), and then go out on my bike and see if I can find a particular kind of long exterior extension cord so I can get hooked up to a meter on my new mooring. Diss work is off the table til Monday, methinks, and I’ll just focus on getting some kind of day-to-day thing going for the next few days. Thunderboxes and some Away places would be maybe the highest priorities, and some flat surfaces and shelves. I have a bit of a plan, but will take things very slow.

thunderbox, ho!

The shitbuckets have arrived – although I am informed that this is an unnecessarily coarse term, and that ‘thunderbox’ is a more suitable term for the sort of toilet I’ll be building, with the added benefit of being funnier. We’ll see.

In any case – these would merely be thunderbuckets. They seem to have slightly different dimensions than their American cousins (shorter and fatter, slightly), so I think I might need to measure and think and adjust the dimensions of the wood I need from Some Hypothetical Builder’s Merchant, which will become less hypothetical soon, one would hope.

Since these particular sorts of buckets are not as ubiquitous here as they are in the States, and I wasn’t able to find anything like them at a few places I looked, I emailed Carrie Blackbird (the only other narrowboater I’ve come across on the interwebs that has a sawdust toilet) and asked her for advice. She very kindly sent me tips about sawdust and bucket acquisition (home brewing supply shops, apparently, are a good source for these buckets) but after looking at a few of those and finding new ones a bit expensive, I did one last desperate search (with new terms, probably) and hit pay dirt – hydroponics supply houses. Which is doubly convenient, as I was going to be trying a kind of container gardening next summer that requires just such buckets, but foodsafe, which diy-supply ones most likely are not, but hydroponics ones are. So. Two birds with one stone.

Drafts of the first three chapters (of six) are with my supervisor, so fingers crossed on that front – there is every possibility that I’ve pitched the whole thing wrong and/or not covered material I should have covered. Working on the next chapter now, and hopefully soon results will be back and the last two chapters will roll trippingly off my fingertips, since, as is well known, results never need time consuming manipulation or interpretation.

The IWA festival thing is this coming weekend, and my fender-making class is 10ish Saturday, so that’s Saturday booked. Sunday I suppose I should do most of my packing and cleaning up (for full deposit return). Or maybe just writing – and the packing and cleaning will be Monday. I need to think about when I want the van for…

House internet has been off for about a week, now. Nothing like a total lack of options to force a person to embrace new technology. The dongle is mostly brilliant, and after some observing and fiddling, it seems like I’ll be able to keep my internet habits pretty much intact. I was heartbroken when I saw that using Opera, I burned through masses of bandwidth, while Firefox was very efficient. I toyed with just switching to Firefox, but after a while it drove me sufficiently batshit that I spent some time googling the issue (it is invisible – apparently I am the only one with this particular experience of Opera being in any way less optimal than Firefox) and made some changes to Opera that seem to have made it as thrifty as Firefox. Which makes me happy. More tweaks probably will have to happen at some point, especially when I fix my main computer and want to synch my bookmarks again… But it is less of a pain than living in FF.

It has been weird to think about the cost of browsing, though – I’ve only ever thought about bandwidth in terms of how fast or slow pages load or downloads shift, but never in terms of efficiency or volume or cost or anything. I don’t even have a vocabulary for it – which is indicative of how much I’ve just expected things to magically appear and how little I have any concept that information takes up physical space and there is a cost to move it. I spose that my perception was that the interwebs are the one place where a free lunch exists – which is about as stupid as the doctor who told me angrily that my kid couldn’t be allergic to red dye because you can’t be allergic to a color. Live and learn.

Ah. And in the most basic news, but excellent – after much handwringing, I cancelled my applications for a canal+river license and a mooring that would require moving, and with help from the previous owner, finally got hold of someone at the marina/moorings/whatever where the boat is now (the website was either the wrong one or had out of date details, not sure) and arranged a liveaboard mooring about half a mile from where it is now, for not much more than I was wanting to pay (ok. half again as much, ish. but not as bad as a few quotes I had gotten!) and on a mooring with no electric or water hookup. So that is excellent and happy news, and my neighbour will help me shift the boat, and that was a HUGE relief… So when I get moved in, I can finish my diss and then find a job and not have to worry about navigation for the forseeable future!

little critter’s first solar installation

This will be boring, useless, and wrong, most likely – but here’s a walkthrough of what I got and what I did with it so far. Click on any photo to see a larger version, but be warned that they will all be fuzzy.

This is my battery:

It’s an Elecsol 110 amp 12 volt. I am probably not capitalising things I should be. It is slightly too heavy for me, and I should have got a 100 amp. Ultimately I want gel batteries (I think – but possibly I mean glass mat batteries…), but that’s on the five year plan. On the one-year plan is one more battery just like this, or possibly two. You’re allowed to mix new and old batteries, but not different size batteries, as I currently understand things, so I can add more whenever, as long as it’s another 110 amp.

The little nubbins/terminals came in a naked state, and I needed to then order the terminal clamps which can be seen here, which allow things to be attached to the battery. One bit of the clamp goes on the nubbin and gets its bolt tightened so it doesn’t come off, and at the other bit of the clamp is a threaded bolt with a sort of moebius strip of a washer and a nut.

Apparently, as long as I don’t touch both terminals at once, or allow anything conductive to touch both terminals at once, I’m not going to cause any problems, death-wise. Someone on a canal forum made a comment about someone doing stupid things with electricity, saying something like ‘we’ll see if you’re laughing when you (blah get zapped or something) – DC has a way of making you stick to it, not like AC which throws you clear’. Which put the fear of God into me, somewhat. Not that I was lacking this in the first place. Oddly, the only warnings I see about all this seem to be ‘don’t allow metal things to come into contact with both terminals simultaneously, as this will damage the battery’, and that’s it.

This is my regulator and the wires that go from the battery to it:

Hm. It’s upside-down and it won’t rotate even though I’ve told it to, but whatever.

The regulator is necessary for a few reasons, two of which are – it protects the battery from overcharging/overdischarging (?), and it has a diode in it which stops electricity running back out of the battery when it’s not being charged. Also useful is that it has connection places for the bit that I can plug things into. Which is called an inverter for now, since I want to be able to plug in normal 240 volt AC appliances, not just 12 volt DC, but at some point I’ll want the 12 volt stuff as well, and will need to figure this out.

If you blow up the picture of the regulator, you’ll see (fuzzily) that there are sort of rings at one end of those wires. The ring bits go over the bolts on the battery terminal – they’re slightly too small, and needed to be forced to screw on and around the threads, which deformed them a bit, but I’m going to file that under ‘feature’. I threaded the red/positive wire onto the battery first, then placed the washer and tightened down the bolt. Then I fiddled with the other end, which had about 1 cm of exposed small twisted copper wires, and I sort of split them in the middle so they could fit half and half into the area in the reguator where they were meant to go – between two plates with a screw in the middle that tightens down to hold the wire in place. Then I did the same thing with the black/negative wire – screwed the loop end onto the battery terminal (after fiddling with the regulator end of the wire to get it ready to slide in easily) – then put the regulator end into the regulator and screwed that down. (The regulator had instructions about which bits to connect in what order, and into which slots, and for backup/instruction-reading-impaired folks, there are images on the front of it as well.) At this point the little lights on the regulator lit up to tell me the battery was 2 lights out of three charged, and that there was a load on the battery (presumably the regulator lights).

This is the back of my solar panel, with its wires:

So next I connected the red/positive wire from the solar panel to the regulator, and finally the same with the black/negative one. As soon as I moved the panel to the open back door, a light on the regulator came on telling me the battery was charging.

It was a grey day, raining some, and the panel was at that point totally vertical, still indoors, and facing a fence, wall, and trees. So, this is heartening, that it will charge (even a tiny bit) on so little input.

This is the solar panel all hooked up and being useful:

Next to do is to sort the inverter I got, which came with a cigarette lighter adapter on the end instead of bare wires – I had seen that it came with this, but thought it was an option that was included for if you wanted it, not like, what it was intended for, since there was another product on the website that looked like it was a dedicated car-adapter thing. So that should be easy enough to sort, and then I can connect that to the regulator in the same way, and then I’ll be able to plug in a normal applicance such as a computer or phone or possibly kettle, but I’ll have to look that up – anything under 150 watts, which rules out the microwave.

In the one-year-or-under plan is another battery (or two), another panel (maybe same kind, maybe a low-profile peel-and-stick), a different regulator which should get more power from the panel to the battery/ies, a meter of some kind so I can see actual amounts of what’s coming in from the panel and what’s coming out of the battery, and a more powerful inverter, possibly – but I’ll have to think more about that later.

Other notes: the batteries need to be kept someplace well-ventilated, and ideally in some sort of tray/container thing so if they leak, the acid is contained – I’ll need to look up more information on this and see what’s good for neutralising and how one deals with leaks/spills. This is why I want the gel kind next – no leaks (if I’m getting the type correct).

eta – hee. Big NO on the kettle – it’s much much worse than the microwave. Which is ok – the whole focus just now was computers and phones, so I can even stick to DC for most of that, and there’s a cheap thingy I can get that will dial up the specific correct voltage for each of my little addictions,which might in turn actually solve one of my computer problems, if I’m extra lucky! And no inverter needed for that, which is good cos they eat up some of the power in converting the current (or whatever is the correct way of saying it).

arg.

Loads of hectic. For a while I was getting ready for a meeting with my supervisor (which was lovely – I’m frustrated with my lack of progress, but she was encouraged and encouraging, which was surprising and delightful and hopefully will help keep my mood light and my motivation high over the next few weeks), and getting the kid ready to move, and all the emotionalness surrounding that…

And then boaty issues. The solar stuffs from Midsummer Energy arrived almost before I ordered them – crazy quick. After opening things up and trying to connect everything it turns out that there are a few other things I’ll need, so it was good to check it out before I wandered off into the wild blue yonder. I went to Tooley’s Boatyard in Banbury and Matt and (I think?) Bob were very helpful, as was Ken from Ultima-Thule (a narrowboat-butty pair) – he came into the shop as I was talking to Matt about towing and being towed, and told me everything I needed to know about towing (hopefully I’ll remember some of it), advised me on ropes, and then since Matt was crazy-busy, Ken also offered to splice my mooring lines and towing straps for me! He walked me out to his mooring, and showed me how Ultima and Thule were attached, measured his towing straps so I’d know the right length to get, and then I pootled back to Thule after I bought my ropes and he spliced and showed me how to splice, even though it made him miss his bus for a folk club barbecue and he’d have to walk. Really lovely man, and a very nice first introduction to boat people.

He also mentioned a waterways festival at the end of August that will have classes on all sorts of things, including one for making a button fender (a photo of which is about halfway down the page here), which I need, so I signed up for that. I like splicing and what little ropework I’ve done, and want to learn more, so this is cool, and ends up (with festival ticket, class cost (which includes materials) and train to the festival) costing about the same as if I’d bought a ready-made fender, with the added value of now I’ll know how to make/repair my own.

So I’ve got mooring pins and ropes, a lump hammer (which I left at the boatyard like a moron, but technically I do own one), a long-throw winch for feeble people such as myself working the paddles on the locks, the composter bits, first aid kit, a hacksaw, some provisions (as long as I’ve got tuna and porridge I should be ok), this water container, which I should sort a stand for at some point

and I tested out my Kelly Kettle –

- and got it lit within a minute, and boiled 50 oz. of water in four minutes. And learned a bit about useful sizes of wood to put in it so it’s easier to set back on the stand after I’ve poured. But that will only be useful when I’m in the middle of nowhere, since built-up areas have smoke-control regulations and things…

And last but not least, there might be a problem with paying for moorings and license in installments by direct debit – an issue which arose yesterday with a phone call from the licensing people. Seems that not being on electoral rolls is a fail as far as some credit-check places are concerned, and I can’t legally be on the electoral rolls here as a result of being the wrong kind of foreigner. After this year I was anticipating being able to pay mooring and license fees in single payments, but this first year I can’t, quite, so I hope the nice people at BW can find a way around this (which they seem to be trying to do, bless them. Much more helpful than I would have expected.).

And I’ve gone through yet MORE stove-dreamings, and have settled on a totally different first and second choice. The Hobbit stove would be probably my ideal, but the Pipsqueak is probably what I’ll go for just now.

It’s small enough that I can move it myself, and get it down the gangplank where the boat is moored now, and the flue pipe doesn’t have to go out through the roof, which might turn out useful cos the bit of wall where the front doors are is a non-steel bit, or something different, anyway, and might be easier to drill through for now (and at any rate I think I’ll be wanting to replace that whole bulkhead anyway). The flue isn’t ideal, either – I will want a do-over before next winter with at least a double-wall flue pipe (if not a whole different stove), but I think I can make do this winter with the low-end stuff.

I found a link to some serious fantasy stoves, though – Navigator Stove Works, crazy beautiful. Perhaps the Halibut will be on my ten year plan…

So for now, dissertation writing, some packing and sorting things for the move, trying to figure out when, exactly, to get a van and shift things, crossing fingers that BW will find a way to approve my direct debit, cos otherwise I’m going to be scrambling and rejigging and rearranging things in currently unimaginable ways… And then in the next few days hopefully ordering the stove – which, since it’s so small, makes sense to have delivered here, and I’ll bring it down with everything else when I shift shit. And I still need a few other things – some poles, probably an anchor and some more rope for that, and of course, the materials for the compost toilet.

Ooh. Except the extra bits for the solar kit just arrived, and after some fiddling and swearing and electrocution paranoia, I’m making electricity and putting it into the battery! In the rain! With an improperly angled panel! Will post photos later. One of the huge frustrations I’ve had with this is that while there are lots of discussions about how solar works, and what bits are better than others, I haven’t found anything showing or telling step by step what goes where and how, wires-wise. It was all ‘connect the panel to the regulator’. Excellent. HOW? But now it seems ok, and I’ll babble in more detail about it later.

dongle!

The solar kit has been ordered from Midsummer Energy, who have been incredibly patient and lovely. I decided that electricity was a higher priority than heat right now, since I’ll probably be able to get by (in the worst case) with warm clothes and hot water bottle for a few months (and a microwave and/or cold food), but will not be able to do without a computer for very long at all. That should come this week. I got the absolute bare minimum, using the absolute cheapest bits I could get, and only one battery. When I’ve settled into the new mooring and have a job, I’ll add another battery or three as a first priority, then another panel just like the one I’ve got (erm. possibly.), and then a better regulator and inverter. (but the stove before all of that =)

I also ordered the bits to make the compost bin and raised bed pedestal for it. I’ll get the other bits at the builders supply place down near the boatyard next time I go.

And maybe most importantly, I ordered a Thing Which I’m Not Sure How To Refer To It – it’s called a MiFi dongle*, I think, which is different from a typical dongle in that with a normal dongle, only one computer or similar device is connected to the interwebs at once (the one it’s plugged into), and then there’s faff about getting it positioned so as to get the best signal while still being able to use the computer (not trivial when living in a steel tube). With this thing, it doesn’t need to plug into the device (so it can be positioned for best signal but my computer doesn’t have to be), it’s the size of a regular mobile phone, up to five devices can be online at once (?) and it goes where you go, so you’ve got your own wifi hotspot wherever you go.

This seems to be the best internet solution, from what I’ve read, and it’s pay as you go, so I can tailor it to my usage, and it should be cheaper than the internet I currently have (for which I’m required to have – and pay for – a BT landline whether I want one or not). It won’t be as fast as regular internet, but that’s fine. This also means I can cancel my smartphone monthly contract and switch back to pay as you go for my google phone, and I’ll just have it on the wifi all the time for the data bits. The dongle will pay for itself during the last month I’m in the house, cos of being able to cancel the landline/internet/mob contract.

And I got first aid kit stuff, and a vast amount of secondhand fabric for net curtains for privacy-without-losing-light, and a broom and dustpan and crowbar and work gloves and spare sewing machine needles, and I’ve been provisioning, and the guidebooks for the canals I’ll be travelling on arrived today, as well as a highly recommended book on fitting out the interior of a narrowboat, so I’ll be poring over those when I shouldn’t be.

The only things left to arrange are the mooring (auction closes on August 2nd), the licence (talked to BW and I’m sending them back and getting partial credit for the time left on the river-only licence and then paying up for a canal+river licence), and insurance (I think paperwork is on the way here). So I can go back to mostly working on my dissertation, and then once I’ve finished the first three chapters I’m in limbo til I get all my samples, and then possibly in limbo til the results come back, so I’ll move in and start setting up then, and should be at least a bit settled into things before my mooring runs out where it is now and I set off into the wide world. (actually, the opposite of the wide world, in Wind in the Willows terms. heh.)

Tomorrow I’m off to see the hoped-for new mooring, and do a little boaty shopping to get supplies for mooring and towing (well. being towed.) and various other necessaries like very long broomstick handles, both with and without hooks at the end. And maybe a headlight for the scary tunnel. And some fenders, which I can never remember the name of when other people are present so I keep embarrassing myself by referring to them as bumpers.

And *then* I’ll be working like a frightened idiot on getting my first three chapters presentable by Wednesday.

*Technically, this use of the term ‘dongle’ is incorrect, but it’s the common name for these things here, so wtf.

okay, here we go…

I’ve got a bit of paper saying I’ve bought a boat. Also other bits of paper about the boat’s licence and inspections. Very exciting.

After pootling around for not nearly long enough (must sort toilet quickly…) I have measurements and an idea for the next few iterations of boat interior.

Looking towards the back of the boat, the bed is going to go along the right side of the photo, next to the little steps you can see leading down. Behind the steps is a little closet, which I’m thinking about taking out, and then I can use that bit of board as a shelf/bench thing along the back wall – someday I’ll put shelves up along that back wall, and that will probably be a kitchen-y place. Oh. And I forgot there would be that door liberated as well… Good!

Looking forward –

a stove will be going into the back left corner, and the toilet probably where the toilet roll holder would be convenient. Other than that, there’s a comfy chair and footstool, two footlockers that will stack to make a work surface, and … some books. And my bike, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be inside, but sometimes it will be.

The hidey hole under the door has some wet plywood in it that wants taking up, but that’s really the only urgent thing that wants doing. Other than that, some different-looking corrosion around the portholes and windows on the outside makes me think the frames are an inappropriate material for the hull, so I might bump that up the to-do list.

I’ve ordered the guide books for the bits of canal I’ll be on, and a narrowboat builder’s book which is recommended for anyone doing any work on their boat, and the British Waterways key (and a spare) which gets you into some locks, and some sanitary facilities, and some drinking water points. I bought a new padlock for the door, and some latches so that when I’m inside the doors can’t be opened from outside, and some other odds and ends.

I think next on the list is stuff to make the compost pile – I think I’m going to get a little kit for a meter-square raised bed garden, line that with a tarp, and then fill that with gravel and leaf mould and dirt, and plant some grass seed – and on top of that put a little square wooden compost bin thing that’s slightly smaller. The compost is going to need air and water (although possibly not as much water as it might get – will sort another tarp in case I need to cover it sometimes), and I need to get some worms in there too – I’m trying to get as close as possible to the sort of compost pile I’d have if I had a garden, but I want a barrier keeping any possible runoff from… running off.

And I want to find a hardware store and get the bits to make the toilet itself, and the straw or sawdust I’ll need for the covering material. Then I’ll be able to stay and work for longer!

I’ve got calls in for insurance quotes, hopefully that will be arranged by close of play tomorrow, and I’ve found out what to do to make it so the boat is licenced on canals instead of just the river-only licence it has now (and I think it will be a reasonable price, which is nice).

And once I get the licence and insurance sorted and run some numbers again I’ll order the stove, or the solar, or both, depending.